Industrial energy communities: Energy storage investment, grid impact and cost distribution

Energy communities are a way for end-users to contribute to the green shift, by installing distributed energy resources such as photovoltaic panels. The focus of energy community studies has mainly been on residential and not industrial consumers. Industrial consumers can be an important key in energy communities, especially with regard to reducing peak demand in the grid. In this article, we use real measurements from a transformer station and an industrial consumer in Norway to find the optimal size of energy storage in two cases: whether the industrial consumer invests independently or collaborates with the local urban area as an energy community. We assess the cost savings of the energy community and the advantages for the distribution system operator, in terms of cost reduction and peak import reduction for the energy community. Ultimately, we investigate the equitable distribution of cost savings from joint investments between the industry and the local urban area. Our results show that thermal energy storage is the most favourable storage option, due to lower investment costs than battery energy storage systems. Furthermore, we find that optimising the storage sizes for the whole energy community leads to both cost reduction for the energy community and a reduction in maximum import for the local grid. The costs are reduced by 1.8%, while the maximum import is reduced by 5%, compared to the reference case where there are no energy storages. Moreover, the economic incentive for industrial consumers to join energy communities is substantially influenced by the selected cost saving redistribution method.